Bothelford’s Gone, Edward McLaren, The Maldon Press, 2026,
The Haxton Review, Joseph Knapp, The Maldon Press, 2026,
Both these works of fiction deal with taboo subjects: Bothelford’s Gone with grooming gangs preying on white working-class English girls, and The Haxton Review with the efforts of a working-class community in a Northern mill town to assert its English identity in the face of a fast-growing Muslim population. Instead of the vibrant diversity of multicultural Britain, which we are constantly enjoined to celebrate, they portray divided communities from the perspective of the indigenous population, the white British or English, who feel under siege and abandoned. This no doubt explains why they have been published in America, courtesy of the Maldon Press, and not in this country. Yet both are important political novels and make for gripping reading. They deserve every success – but don’t expect to see them displayed in Waterstone’s.
Bothelford’s Gone depicts the coming of age of Jack Grundon, a white lad raised in the dilapidated Northern town of Bothelford, once thriving and self-confident, but now reduced to a shadow of its former self by a combination of deindustrialisation and ‘colonisation’ through mass immigration. The indigenous English take refuge in the virtual reality served up by their screens, spiced up with pornography, and seem to exist in a drug-induced stupor; the Muslim population, meanwhile, grows inexorably. Jack, an only child, is indoctrinated at school from an early age in the virtues of diversity and the evils of white oppression – yet he longs instinctively for a sense of belonging and a taste of adventure. School resembles a battleground more than a place of learning. The insults ‘kafir’ and ‘white bitch’ are casually flung around, but when Jack causes offence to a Muslim student by doubting the existence of Allah, he is referred to a psychiatrist and prescribed medication. He takes refuge in study and becomes the model student. He is destined for Oxbridge, along with ‘Fauna’, an effete transgender student ‘covered in scars’, also white, whom he finds pitiful – and yet it will be ‘Fauna’ who comes to Jack’s aid in his hour of need.
Then Jack discovers that Agatha, the only white girl in the class, is being gang raped, and that the instigator is Mr Hussein, his English teacher from Kabul. She seems to treat Jack with contempt but is really crying out for help. An even younger girl has been lined up for the same treatment, and Jack’s world soon implodes. He has loving middle class parents but being staunch liberals, they are oblivious to the realities of the multicultural dream. Jack stops working, bunks off school, and sets out to avenge Agatha – a decision that will bring him up against the combined forces of corrupt, complicit officialdom, who are determined to destroy him.
The book has its flaws, as one might expect of a first novel. I found the introductory scene-setting laboured – a heady mix of history, politics, and myth, overloaded with awkward metaphors. And Jack’s character loses authenticity when he becomes the mouthpiece for political polemic. But once I got past the first dozen pages, I could not put the book down. The characters are not always entirely convincing, but the drama is compelling, and the raw, tragic figure of Agatha, a young girl reduced to ‘a kind of alabaster twitching doll’ covered in scars and bruises, is depicted with understanding and sensitivity. The ending is both powerful and touching.
Bothelford’s Gone was unfavourably reviewed in the Pimlico Review on account of its omission of key details and its pervading air of fatalism, the implication being that justice will never be done. But although the story is ‘based on documented past events’ and interspersed with hair-raising evidence from the real-life victims of the gangs, the book is essentially a dystopian novel, a nightmare vision set in the apocalyptic present – and therein lies its power. There is a glimmer of hope in the end, as love and decency win through, but although escape from the State Machine is possible for the brave or lucky few, this is only because there are still places of refuge to be found far away. The Machine is too powerful to be fought. That is the dystopia we face.
Liberals will be shocked by the novel’s brutal ‘them and us’ depiction of the realities of multicultural Britain, as when it depicts ubiquitous advertisements depicting black and Muslim men with subordinate white women – advertisements that seem to Jack to proclaim, ‘You are going extinct, whites. Please go extinct. Have a lovely evening.’ Some will regard it as a dangerous and divisive manifesto for ‘ethno-nationalism’ that ought to be banned; but others will find in it a powerful and justified call to resistance.
The Haxton Review documents, in diary form, the attempt of a small community of working-class white English centred on Lantyrn Royd in the Haxton suburb of a Northern industrial town to assert their threatened identity. Encircled by Muslims, and walled in by a mosque on one side, they decide to revive ‘The Rush Bearing’, a traditional procession, part pagan and part Christian, featuring a child dressed up as a crusader knight; but local Muslims, supported by the local council, the police and sundry anti-racist protest groups, object to what they see as a provocation, since part of the procession’s route will go through their area.
The Lantyrn Royd community’s dilapidation is mirrored in the lifestyle of Adam, the book’s narrator and anti-hero, whose earlier ambitions to escape the area and become first an academic and then a Catholic priest came to nothing, and who is reduced to doing shift work at a local warehouse, his shabby private life a brew of drink and cigarettes (for breakfast), online sexual encounters (explicitly detailed but hilarious), and long walks in the moors that surround the town. His interest is piqued by the mounting tensions as the day of the procession approaches, as well as by his insufferably self-righteous journalist brother who lives the life of a model bourgeois liberal in the capital, and is ‘paid handsomely for crapping [his] liberal virtue all over much less well-off people like the Rush Bearers’; and Adam finds his mission in launching an online video channel to give the beleaguered and maligned white English a voice.
The book takes the form of a series of online video scripts contained within Adam’s diary, the scripts consisting of interviews with the Lantyrn Royd community, mostly at the White Horse pub, which serves as its hub, a blow-by-blow account of the rising tensions as Adam takes on the task of filming and documenting the story, and the narrator’s reflections (here, Adam’s intellectual background proves useful) on the cultural and political issues at stake.
Tensions between the communities are already high on account of recent riots and the activities of a local Pakistani grooming gang. But as the day of the procession approaches, agitators from outside pile in on both sides, and the pressure grows on the Lantyrn Royd community to ‘re-imagine’ their procession as something more ‘inclusive’, the area begins to resemble a war zone, complete with beatings and arson attacks, barricades and a volunteer-run taxi service to ferry the locals – the white English – to and from the centre of town in safety.
The narrator’s reflections enable the author to mount a powerful and distinctly Scrutonian defence of our need for a shared sense of rootedness in a culture, of the sacred and transcendent, and of home. The tragedy is that ‘like most indigenous Western Europeans’, and unlike their Muslim counterparts, the Rush Bearers of Lantyrn Royd ‘do not have a proper home anymore, understood as the common space where shared meanings and values are encoded in flesh, stone and custom, and where culture is diffused in stories and ceremonies’. Instead, they have to make do with the nihilistic, narcissistic world of late liberalism in which freedom of choice reigns supreme, the ‘self-seeking self’ parades his individual identity ‘before an endlessly adoring community’, and the ‘diversity dogma’ reigns supreme; or to put it another way, a world of ‘diverse, disconnected, atomised shoppers’ who ‘oil the wheels of commerce’.
The local characters are rounded, raw and convincing. Jason, a tattooed stalwart of the White Horse, who initially mistrusts Adam because of his middle-class airs, turns out to be ‘the Coxthorpe Dalesman’, a skilled camera operator, whose online natural history video channel has 25,000 subscribers. He offers to help Adam ‘because if yer gonna be making films about us, I dun’t want them to look shite’. He tells him that the moors ‘are the best things about Coxthorpe. They’re ours aren’t they.’ And goes on, ‘You don’t get any Asians up on the moors, neither … It in’t their land is it? Not really. So, they don’t care for it like we do.’
The genteel liberal ‘love not hate’ view is represented by the local vicar, the Rev Lavinia Shaw, who, fearful that things will explode, tries to persuade Adam to use his video channel to calm community tensions. But the author also depicts her sympathetically – not as a naïve do-gooder but as an intelligent and persuasive advocate of the alternative view, who has the advantage over Adam that when she talks of Christianity, she actually believes in it.
The author avoids caricaturing those engaged in promoting the official narrative of extolling diversity and multiculturalism, whether by fair means or foul (it is the vicar, a former civil servant, who explains to Adam what ‘spotlighting’ is). Their ‘promoting community cohesion’ agenda possesses a certain plausibility, a cold logic, if the aim is to prevent an all-out civil war. Except that the official ideology also entails the destruction of the people, the culture, the history and the values that the author defends so eloquently.
Joshua Knapp’s novel is a skilfully-crafted page-turner with a disturbing twist in the end. The message is powerful and important – but the novel is as much a lament as a call to resistance. Its message is to beware. If England is to survive, and the English to have any future, they will need leadership of the highest order that understands the forces ranged against them and how to play them. Reform and Restore had better watch out.
